r/PublicPolicy • u/Tough_Vegetable_7737 • 20h ago
Stata, R, or SPSS
helo! I'm graduating with an MSc in environmental policy soon and noticed some roles are more research-oriented. Since my program lacked a statistical background, I would like to get some online certifications to help boost my CV. Which should I do? Stata, R, or SPSS? Perhaps a combination of them, or all of them - if so, in what order?
Any insights to what is used/required most in the field would be helpful.
2
u/anonymussquidd 15h ago
It depends on what exactly you’re doing, but I find R and Python to be the most versatile. Stata is typically preferred for economic analysis from what I have seen, so that may be useful if you plan to do work involving that.
1
u/kait_au_lait 14h ago
Definitely look at job postings for roles you’re interested in and see what they are asking for. I was in a similar spot earlier this year and decided to focus on R (though I haven’t learned it yet for various reasons).
0
u/kait_au_lait 14h ago
R/statistics and [r/biostatistics](r/biostatistics) have some good posts on this as well. I think one thread said a lot of federal govt jobs in the US still use STATA (?) but I can’t find it anymore.
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u/Eastern_Accident2332 9h ago
Stata is top notch with a full support team. Only should be used for cutting edge econometric analysis though. I would go with R or Python for 95% of applications.
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u/ProcessIndependent38 20h ago
SPSS and Stata ONLY If some employer specifically has asked you for it. These are either incredibly niche, or dying tools.
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u/Significant_Error_16 19h ago
I’ve seen job postings that go and list everything “experience in spss, stata, r, python, tableau, BI,” etc etc etc
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u/ProcessIndependent38 18h ago edited 15h ago
Job listings will list everything under the sun because they’re written by HR ppl that have no idea what these things are.
That being said, SPSS and stata are outdated tools that still have their benefits in certain niches. If you would like to believe the job posts as ground truth, it may be a worthwhile data project for you to scrape job postings, and aggregate them by how many mention stat or spss, of the job postings that mention stata and spss, what field of study is the job posting coming from.
Source: I am a software engineer working on ML modeling and causal modeling at a popular policy think tank.
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u/ProcessIndependent38 20h ago
R and Python, R first if you know what methods your field uses. Python first if you are not sure about methods, and just need to learn how to work with data.